When the stories first started going around last week about Quentin Tarantino's just-finished script for "Inglorious Bastards" - and I'll assume that's how he meant to spell it, and not the "Inglourious Basterds" he scrawled over the actual cover page - I resisted the urge to jump on.

Because, to me, the whole thing felt like old-fashioned, loud-mouthed, sharp-elbowed producer hype - in other words, the Harvey Weinstein treatment - engineered to get people talking about a movie that didn't even have a studio yet, let alone a committed budget, cast or start date.

But then the script itself started showing up at a few places, which started people reading, and talking. And me listening.

The best coverage, I thought, was over at the dependably detailed Hollywood Elsewhere site, where Jeffrey Wells pronounced the wartime story less realistic than "Hogan's Heroes," full of cliches and flatly unbelievable details. He also pronounced it pretty terrific, saying the whacked-out, sugar-rush craziness was a large part of its charm.

QT, in his "Reservoir Dog" days

"He doesn't care, of course, and that's why he's Quentin Tarantino You can feel him in his element, living in his head and flaunting a clever, dumb-ass yarn that entertains every step of the way, and -- this is the cool part -- in a kind of oddly sophisticated fashion. Which is what he's been doing since "Pulp Fiction."

I'd agree. But I'd add that what defines Tarantino as a filmmaker may be gradually limiting him as an artist.

From the first time I saw "Reservoir Dogs," 16 years ago, there hasn't been a Tarantino film I haven't enjoyed on some level - even ones he only had a hand in, like "True Romance" (or even, all guilty pleasures admitted, "From Dusk Till Dawn") or ones that went on too long (like "Kill Bill," which I still think should have been a single, shorter movie). Tarantino has a great ear for dialogue, a wonderful eye for startling images and a totally requited love for strong female characters.

But after all these years, his movies are still mainly movies about movies, not movies about people.

They were all hugely enjoyable projects. But all of them were still films about other films, instead of films about truly human characters.

Judging by the early word on "Inglorious Bastards" - the title lifted from a forgotten-by-everyone-else Fred Williamson schlocker - we're in for more of the same. This isn't, apparently, based on World War II. It's based on World War II movies - chiefly, the kind of bad, long-after-the-fact B pictures where every Nazi has a sneer, and the partisans' greatest weapon is a peasant girl with heaving cleavage.

Two decades after his debut, Tarantino is still re-cutting and re-casting other people's pictures in his head. And while the results are often initially great fun to watch, after a while there's a slightly fuzzy feel to them - as if you were seeing a second- or third-generation copy of someone else's 16mm print.

Which, in a way, you are.

Now, of course Tarantino is enough of a stylist - and aficionado of underused performers and great acting - to still deliver enormously fun entertainments. But I suspect he's capable of more. (The underrated "Jackie Brown" for example, tells you about its characters instead of its inspirations - and remains his least gimmicky, most emotionally resonant film.) And I wonder if he's ever going to push himself to do it.

The movie only he remembers.

Of course, he's not alone in this predilection for hip Hollywood mimicry. Once the movie-brat generation started taking control of the studio cameras - wresting them away, in many cases, from directors who had life experiences, not graduate degrees -- cinematic in-jokes and film-school homages became the order of the day.

A doctoral thesis could (and probably has) been written about Martin Scorsese's life-long tributes to "The Searchers." For more than 30 years, George Lucas has Cuisinarted the films of Akira Kurosawa, Leni Riefenstahl and a variety of Saturday-matinee hacks. Half-a-dozen Steven Spielberg productions are impossible to imagine without their classic Disney images.

Yet even as Scorsese and Spielberg and Lucas pay tribute to the movies they loved as kids, they still function as adults, creating films full of real, idiosyncratic and quite original people. And even as other artists turn out wickedly ironic, nastily stylish, slam-bang entertainments - Steven Soderbergh's "Out of Sight," Bryan Singer's "The Usual Suspects," Christopher Nolan's "Memento" - they manage to do it without pausing to quote every movie they saw in junior high.

But unlike many of those new-generation artists, Tarantino never went to college - in fact, his "film school" was his crummy job at a video store, where he could watch all the movies he wanted. He doesn't have his older peers' cultural references, either - Lucas' reading in myth and folklore, Scorsese's seminary training, Francis Ford Coppola's lifelong love of classical music, even Spielberg's devotion to Norman Rockwell.

All he has is the movies. Mostly, B movies.

And so, even if Tarantino's lovingly crafted films are gourmet popcorn, they're still popcorn. And although that's clearly enough for him - and the only obligation any artist has is to be true to his or her own inspiration - I wonder if it's going to be enough to take him through a long and important career.

Because Tarantino is a true cinema savant - gleefully obsessed with `70s trash, foreign exploitation, trailer-park fashions and, um, closeups of women's bare feet (the last of which we'll ignore for now). No other director so avidly imparts the sheer joy of what happens when you're sitting inside a grungy, second-run movie theater, watching.

Yet no other major filmmaker seems as uninterested in what happens - really happens - when you step outside its four windowless walls.